No Riders: Desert Crossing Is for the Robots Only

By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: March 8, 2004

ALBANY, Calif.—
Anthony S. Levandowski is working feverishly with a team of students from the University of California at Berkeley to build an ambitious robot motorcycle to race without a driver across the Mojave Desert.

They are part of a crowd that has been attracted by a Pentagon promise to pay $1 million to the creators of the first self-guided vehicle to find its way this Saturday along a programmed course from Barstow, Calif., to near Las Vegas.

Mr. Levandowski's robot motorcycle will be joined by pickups, sport utility vehicles, Hummers and other all-terrain vehicles, some with as many as six wheels and all packed with computers and sensors -- but with no space for humans.

The Pentagon, under a mandate from Congress to save lives by turning to unmanned combat vehicles to meet a third of its needs by 2015, has become impatient with its usual crowd of big-name military contractors, like the Lockheed Martin Corporation and the General Dynamics Corporation, to come up with a solution. It turned instead to the spur of free market capitalism, inspiring a motley band of computer scientists, artificial intelligence experts and robot lovers to take on the challenge.

It is not clear whether any of the couple of dozen vehicles expected to line up at the start will be able to complete the task. After first passing a preliminary test scheduled to begin today, the winning machine will then have to navigate unaided at an average speed of about 20 miles an hour through a desert strewn with boulders, trees, brush, potholes and possibly the odd porcupine or donkey.

By some measures, that should not be so hard. Once the stuff of science fiction, autonomous vehicles have become relatively commonplace. Airplanes take off and land under computer control, iRobot's $199 Roomba vacuum cleaner trundles itself through living rooms, and Sony sells a $1,599 pet robot.

Yet the challenge of designing ground-hugging, path-finding automated vehicles remains one of the thorniest tasks facing those who work on artificial intelligence.

Before Mr. Levandowski's Ghostrider motorcycle can even begin its 200-mile ordeal, it must wobble 20 feet across a grass field here at a makeshift test site. Turned loose, the riderless machine struggles for balance by violently swinging its front wheel back and forth and then repeatedly performs a series of ungainly tumbles.

''It's driving like a drunken teenager,'' Mr. Levandowski said with a sigh, as he packed up the battered two-wheeler for more fine-tuning in the laboratory.

For the hundreds of computer scientists, robot developers, software specialists and hardware hackers who have designed the vehicles, the task may be even harder than what NASA has gone through in learning how to control the interplanetary Mars rover from Earth.

''Unless they make the course really easy,'' said Hans Moravec, a pioneer in the robotic field at Carnegie Mellon University, ''it looks unlikely'' that any of the competitors will succeed on Saturday.

Even the favored Carnegie Mellon Red Team -- led by William L. Whittaker and backed by $3 million raised from, among other sponsors, the Boeing Company and the Intel Corporation -- is far from certain that its robot Hummer will find its way to the finish line.

''This is about raising all the ships,'' said Mr. Whittaker, a roboticist who is known as Red.

He says his team does not care that much about garnering the $1 million prize that the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, or Darpa, has dangled.

Nonetheless, Mr. Whittaker's team, like several other well-financed groups, has gone to elaborate lengths to improve its chances by buying ultrahigh resolution digital imagery of the desert in an effort to preplan potential routes.

For all the preparations, the most important decisions to be made, Mr. Whittaker explained during an interview after the public unveiling of his vehicle in February in San Francisco, will be just before the race begins. Two hours before, Darpa officials plan to hand out route information, giving each team only a short time to plot the optimal path for its vehicle.

''This is the race before the race,'' Mr. Whittaker said.

That has led to complaints from some competitors, who argue that a highly detailed top-down digital map of the route offers an advantage that skirts close to cheating on the autonomous navigation challenge Darpa has established.

''People who overfly the course are missing the spirit of the competition,'' said Bruce Hall, a member of Digital Auto Drive, a team from Morgan Hill, Calif. It is using an optical vision system capable of tracking objects as far as 800 feet in front of its Toyota Tundra robot pickup. ''You can do it legally,'' he added, ''but if you are trying to bird-dog your way to a million bucks, good luck to you.''

Race insiders say that the course, whose route is still secret, will be about 180 miles long and that on the morning of the event Darpa will give each competitor a CD containing about 5,000 global positioning satellite waypoints.

''The trails are windy, and there are edges where the road drops off sharply,'' a Darpa spokeswoman, Jan Walker, said.

The challenge for the military agency, which is taking elaborate precautions to make sure that the vehicles don't damage property or hurt people, has been in keeping a balance between completely turning the vehicles loose and ensuring safety.

Military helicopters will fly over the course and each robot will be followed by a chase vehicle equipped with a kill switch should a contestants veer into danger.

When the event was first planned, Darpa announced that the race would begin with a mass start. Later, that idea was scrapped for fear of the chaos that might result.

Now the vehicles will be sent off in a more controlled time-trial fashion. Despite the controversy, most experts agree that the Pentagon agency has hit on a brilliantly inexpensive, high-profile approach to helping advance robotic technology.

''I'm a little bit sad to see that many waypoints, because the more you constrain the vehicles, the less autonomous is the challenge,'' said Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford University Robotics Laboratory. ''At the same time I'm delighted that Darpa is doing this. If someone succeeds, it will open the eyes of the world.''

The original announcement about two years ago led to more than 100 entrants; last March the agency cut the field to 25. To deal with the overflow, the newly created International Robot Racing Federation has set up another race for later this year.

Mr. Levandowski, who is leading the Berkeley motorcycle team, took a year off from graduate school, paying for the project in part by renting out rooms in his home, and sought out teammates by posting fliers around campus.

Since then he has started a company, Robotic Infantry, to develop both commercial and military applications from his research project. ''We see the race,'' he said ''as an opportunity for creating a new platform for robotics.''

Other teams are also looking beyond the race. Team Overbot, a Silicon Valley team that has already announced it would not be ready, said it would come back next year if nobody won the first race.

Just as promising as any useful military technologies that might emerge, said John Nagle, Team Overbot's leader, are the potential commercial applications.

''The killer app for this thing is automatic rental car return at the airport,'' he said. ''Everyone else focuses on driving in the fast lane. What people hate is driving in traffic.''

Photo: Anthony S. Levandowski gets his robot motorcycle ready to compete for a $1 million prize from the Pentagon. It will try to become the first self-guided vehicle to find its way along a programmed course across the Mojave Desert. (Photo by Frederic Neema/Gamma) Map of California highlighting possible routes the robot motorcycle may take through the Mojave Desert.